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For more information, please contact Lex Leifheit at 860-685-2806
or lleifheit@wesleyan.edu.
Brett Cook-Dizney’s Meditations Provides
Food for Thought at Wesleyan’s Zilkha Gallery
April 19—May 22
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Mural-size paintings, graffiti, Audio/Video and Participation
Combine for an Exhibition in Looking Deeply
Middletown, CT, April 1, 2005— Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts will host a major exhibition of work by Brett Cook-Dizney, beginning Wednesday, April 20 and running through Sunday May 22, 2005. The gallery, located at 283 Washington Terrace, is open to the public free of charge. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday, noon to 4pm.
Two special events, also free to the public, are planned in association with the exhibition. On Tuesday, April 19 at 4:15pm in Zilkha room 106, a public dialogue with Cook-Dizney will explore the social, cultural, and spiritual realities of contemporary America and how his work is involved in those realities. On Wednesday, April 20 from noon to 1pm in Zilkha Gallery, a reception will include an artist talk and the completion of a piece of social collaboration.
All of the work in this show, in process and product, involve aspects of meditation to catalyze contemplation. Brett Cook-Dizney is perhaps best known for his self reflective, large-scale, shrine-like installations incorporating biographical materials as well as drawings, objects, words and photographs—his Multifaceted series. Two of these, Documentation of a Grandma and Documentation of Blackness, will be on display at Zilkha. A third collaborative work, incorporating Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, will be developed with the assistance of Zilkha curator Nina Felshin’s undergraduate class, Issues in Contemporary Art. Attendees of the opening reception will have an opportunity to contribute to this new work that models Freire’s idea of Praxis—reflection and action.
Many of Cook-Dizney’s paintings, installations and drawings involve portraiture. Those works created in spray enamel are inspired by graffiti but are vastly more complex. Using color theory and spray paint, Cook-Dizney takes the medium of graffiti art and creates complex portraits that can easily be mistaken for brush painting. As much as he is inspired by the more recent post-modern history of graffiti, Cook-Dizney is also influenced by the classic modernist history of painting, synthesizing a variety of visual languages and histories.
Cook-Dizney’s Models of Accountability series, which resulted from an ongoing study of avatars for social change, is also represented in the exhibition, including portraits of César Chávez and Arundhati Roy on mirrors. An assortment of their written words and published text are accessible on mirrored shelves at the base of each piece. These works shift and refract their imagery as the viewer moves among them. By allowing the mirror to show through the paintings, the viewers can recognize themselves within, rather than apart from, these advocates of human value.
A series of spray enamel drawings on transparent acetate from the Images of Hip Hop series looks deeply at the origins of one of America’s most popular cultural products. An abundance of drawings from the Mindfulness series, executed in a variety of scales and materials, will be on display with particularreference to Buddhist concepts. These two series use figuration to reference specific historical, social, and spiritual histories and to change the world by redefining the way popular images are viewed.
Along with his gallery work, Cook-Dizney has engaged in numerous public projects, including a collaborative project in South Central Los Angeles addressing divinity and the Development/Gentrification Project with 10 installations throughout Harlem. Cook-Dizney's social collaborations typically depict people living in the areas where the work is installed, bringing art to a wide audience that does not always frequent museums and galleries. Using ethnographic and pedagogical strategies, the work always involves the participation of the subject. “It’s about giving people a voice, empowering marginalized communities," explains the artist. This aspect of his work will be represented by photo-documentation, videotapes, and several paintings on panels in Zilkha’s South Gallery.
Brett Cook-Dizney received a B.A. in art from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991. His Minor in education has played an important part in the development of his work and his frequently participatory process. He has exhibited in museums and galleries since 1991 while simultaneously engaging in public projects. His public projects, often ephemeral in nature, have been executed in the United States from California to Maine and internationally in Brazil, Barbados and Mexico. Some have been commissioned by museums or public agencies while others have been self-initiated interventions in abandoned spaces. Cook-Dizney has completed scores of these projects, often through an interactive and collaborative process. He has received a number of awards including residencies at Skowhegan School and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and he has been an active teacher and lecturer. He is represented in New York by the PPOW Gallery This exhibition is curated by Nina Felshin.
Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts is an 11-building complex on the Wesleyan campus that houses the departments of art and art history, film studies, music, theater and dance. It serves as a cultural center for the region, the state and New England. The CFA includes the 400-seat Theater, the 260-seat Cinema, the World Music Hall (a non-Western performance space), the 414-seat Crowell Concert Hall and the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. For more information about CFA performances and events, call (860) 685-3355, or visit www.wesleyan.edu/cfa.
Box Office Phone: (860) 685-3355 Address: Wesleyan University
Box Office Fax: (860) 685-3935 222 Church Street
E-mail: boxoffice@wesleyan.edu Middletown, CT 06459-0001
*Performers and schedule are subject to change.
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